Our blog was on a long hiatus, but finally there is an entry amongst our women beyond success. The prelude has given a small introduction of here life. To quench the rest of your curiosity, here is a brief biography of Daphne Makinson.
Daphne was born on July 30, 1945, in Brighton, a town on the south coast of England, just 6 weeks after the end of World War II. Food rationing was to last until she was seven.
Her mother's name was Lavinia Jones who influenced her throughout her life, despite dying relatively early. Daphne saw a good marriage between her maternal grandparents who lived 10 miles away, but not among the next generation. Daphne's father was from an emotionally austere family and had lost his sister to TB at 12. He was a cabinet maker and her mom was a nurse and an artist.
Lavinia and Mak married each other at 23 after 5 years of courting. Their first child was stillborn, the next two were boys named Hugh and Colin and third was the baby girl Daphne. In 1948, the family moved back to the east coast to Felixstowe and opened an art shop. The house they lived in was huge, but difficult to maintain, just one fireplace in 15 rooms. Daphne and I tried to find pictures of that house in old photographs and books. She was able to find the street pictures, and one picture of half of the house as it was being demolished in 1969.
With her Father, Mother, Brothers, Grandmother holding baby Daphne Daphne and her brothers went to the same school and they loved it. There was a public exam given when each child was 10-11 years of age to determine their academic schooling that they then went to until they were 15, 16 or 18. They either went to Grammar school or the Secondary Modern school depending on their grades. Daphne was into sports as much as she was into academics. She played field hockey and netball (a kind of women's basketball).
Felixstowe had all 4 seasons, but it was wet and rainy for the most part. They mostly swam in the North Sea, worked in the art shop, hung out with friends in coffee shops and as teenagers went to many dances. Religion was not a major part of their childhood, nor later.Daphne's first memory is being carried on her Uncle's shoulders when they were moving into their new house in Felixstowe. The house had been vacant for 15 years and there was a sink full of spiders. Their parents had to clean and paint the house, starting from the top down. The children had clean new bedrooms that they called Fairyland. The house also had a concrete yard and stables in the back.
Daphne's father was temperamental and was financially stressed. When Daphne was 13, their father took a job as a teacher, 30 miles away from their house. He would come home on the weekends and work all week. Then after one Christmas, he never came back.When Daph was 15, their mother had to be operated on due to varicose veins, and that operation landed her a job as a nurse, in that hospital. The art shop was closed and the brothers were in college by that time and helped when they came home. When Daph was 16, her mother suggested she might have to drop out of school. Daphne said No, her brothers got a chance to go to college, so would she. End of conversation.Her eldest brother, Hugh, used to work as a Mining Engineer but returned to Felixstowe to help their mom financially, then joined the Air Force. Her second brother Colin became a Civil Engineer, She was 18 when she moved out of that house. She found a job in London as a Computer Programmer through newspaper job advertisements and a year later went to the University of East Anglia, just established in Norwich.Their mother, Lavinia, was offered a job as matron of a group home in the West Country, Somerset, where she later moved her mother also. That year, Daphne and the others left the old house for good.In the year of 1963, when Daphne worked for Central Electricity Generating Company, when computers were as big as rooms, she met her life long English-Chinese girlfriend - Christine. They celebrated 50 years of friendship not long ago.Young and sassy Daphne in the big city of London. For fun, they went dancing at the London School of Economics, often with her second brother Colin (who at that time lived down the street) until they closed down the dancehall when JFK was shot. They heard the news on the neighbors' radio, through the walls as they didn't have one of their own.As a child, Daphne wanted to go to Australia, since the fare only cost around 10 pounds if you stayed for at least 2 years. That changed when she came to London, got State grants that helped her through college and she got her Bachelor's degree in Mathematics. She chose not to be an engineer because in those days they never sent a woman to work on-site. Also as a child she always wanted to travel, that did not change, and every summer during her college years, she traveled far and wide. Summer of 1965, at the end of first year in college, she hitch-hiked in pairs with 3 other girls who met every third day to check-in with each other. They went to Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and Austria. End of second year in '66 she got a deal, $99 for 99 days on Greyhound buses in America and came to NYC for the first time. By bus, Daphne traveled around 17K miles in 3 months. The third summer was when she graduated and she went to Europe again; France, Spain and Portugal. After that break, she came back to England to work for British Aircraft Corporation - building Concord - the supersonic passenger plane that would fly the Atlantic in 3 hours. Her job was quite thrilling - Daph converted Fortran2 to COBOL Code in a program to test if the wings would fall off when the plane went supersonic. The department was called Mathematical Services for engineers and had 25 men and 1 woman. For some this would be the place to be, but Daphne found it boring - the people there either worked or pretended to when they weren't busy. She was looking for a way out.In the winter of 1968, she quit to join her brothers (and his friends) on a ski trip. There were 2 women, the other being Patricia, who later married Hugh. I met Pat this summer when she was visiting Daphne in Vermont after Hugh's demise. Pat claims that at that time, Daphne said that she (Daphne) would have 2 children and would not marry. Exactly how it turned out.After the ski trip, she went on to live in Spain for that winter. Spain is where she met her second longest running friend Myra, from New York. Also, in her earlier visit to Portugal during summer months, Daphne had met a young man who she returned to this time. She traveled to Morocco then back to Portugal where he was at university. Daph was 23 and he was 27, they had hopes and dreams for the future. They planned to travel, teach and go to Angola, where his family now lived. The plans fell apart when the Portuguese boyfriend died of a congenital heart problem. Daphne came back to England.It was a Friday when she came back to Oxford and interviewed for a teaching position that same day. A teacher had left to play cricket for England and on the Monday, she started the job at an all boys Grammar School teaching Physics and Applied Math. With that job, came the idea to get a further degree (equivalent to Master of Arts in Teaching) which allowed you to teach anywhere in the world, which opened her avenues to the land of United States of America.
